Minor Modifications
by slipstream
Summary: He builds the tattoo gun because he can, not really expecting to ever use it, but when Mikey realizes just what Donnie's made out of an old Walkman, some wire, and a busted ballpoint pen, his face lights up like a beam of sunshine through a sewer grate. (2k14-verse)


**Note: This fic features teenagers giving themselves homemade body mods in barely-sanitary conditions. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Save up your money and seek out trained professionals for any tattooing, branding, piercing, etc. You will be much, **_**much**_** happier with the results, and you will have a much lower risk of the horrific infections and other complications I gloss over here.**

* * *

><p>He builds the tattoo gun because he <em>can<em>, not really expecting to ever use it, but when Mikey realizes just what Donnie's made out of an old Walkman, some wire, and a busted ballpoint pen, his face lights up like a beam of sunshine through a sewer grate.

"Here," he says, pointing at a spot high on his left shoulder. "Sensei can't get mad if it's the family symbol, right?"

Sensei can, it turns out. They are a month shy still of thirteen, the lecture goes, far too young for such permanent decisions. They spend five hours in the Hashi, one for every line in the simple turtle design based off of Master Splinter's pendant.

Nothing can unstick the ink from Mikey's skin, however, and Splinter will not realize until it is far too late that he has not succeeded in discouraging his sons' interest in body modification.

He has only set a precedent as to the price.

Six months later, the crude design has been refined and expanded, blooming outward in twisting, piecemeal fractals until it covers nearly the whole of Mikey's deltoid. Mikey's handstand pushup technique is absolutely flawless, and Donnie has gotten very, _very_ good at juggling blindfolded while rolling back and forth on a steel oil drum.

His linework isn't too shabby, either.

* * *

><p>"You guys are going to get caught," says Leo dully, sprawled on the far end of the couch with his beak buried in a coverless Ray Bradbury anthology. Donnie can't see Mikey's answering eye roll, too focused on keeping the buzzing tattoo gun steady as it navigates the canyons and planes of his brother's scaled skin, but they've had this same conversation often enough that he recognizes the echoing flutter of it under his hands as the gesture works its way through the rest of Mikey's body.<p>

"No _duh_. We always get caught. Kinda impossible not to."

"What do you think Sensei'll cook up for us this time?" Donnie asks, wiping off the excess ink and leaning back to survey his progress. The design is something Mikey found on a washed-up show flier, a psychedelic sun with four surfboards radiating out from a central blossom of fire. It's a complicated piece, but if he works quickly he should be able to finish the outline and stash his equipment before Master Splinter and Raph come back from their scavenging trip.

"Another twenty thousand years on the gymnastic rings for me," Mikey groans. "I just wish he let me swap up the poses more than once a half-hour. Shit gets _old_."

"Tell me about it." Donnie dips the gun back into the little capful of ink for a quick reload. It's a new recipe he'd found online, and so far he's been very pleased with how smooth it is to work with. "Think he'll let us trade? I could seriously use a break from back flip dodgeball."

"Doubt it," Mikey grunts, careful to hold still as the needle presses into his skin. "There's probably some big lesson he's trying to teach us."

"Seems clear enough to me," says Leo crisply, turning a page. "'Quit it with the tattoos.'" Mikey dismisses him with a wave of his free hand.

"Methinks envy is the soul of his snit," he says to Donnie in a mock whisper.

"That's not how it _goes_," Leo huffs, dropping _Tomorrow Midnight_ into his lap. "And just what am I supposed to be envious _of_?"

"That I was first," Mikey beams.

From the quick glimpse Donnie catches of Leo's expression before he hurriedly shutters it away, he guesses that Mikey's struck at the heart of the matter.

Mikey's self-satisfied jubilation is the yang to Leo's shadowed yin. Donnie can't help but echo his smile, knowing that the two of them will get their own gymnastic comeuppance soon enough, but he knows from experience that sometimes Mikey needs puncturing before he swells into a full-out gloat.

"That's not quite true," he says. "Sensei has one on his tail."

Mikey swivels his head back towards Donnie, eye ridges raised in surprise. "Really? Of what?"

"His lab serial number. With the size change it's too distorted and spread out to read, but it's there."

"Huh." Mikey chews at his lip, thinking. "You think that's why he's got a problem with the whole tattoo thing?"

Donnie tilts his head and hums noncommittally. "Maybe. I think the sneaking around behind his back is the bigger issue, though."

"Maybe he just thinks Mikey's are tacky," Leo says, but there's no real venom behind it. He watches Donnie work, close enough to see the tattoo slowly taking shape, far enough away to plausibly deny his way out of a stint in the Hashi of his own.

For a while things fall back into an easy, brotherly silence, broken only by the tattoo gun's buzzing monotone.

"You ever worry about changing your mind?" Leo asks at length. "Being stuck with something that you don't like?"

"Nah," says Mikey, his smile easy and warm. "It's just skin, dude. It's gonna get banged up one way or another. Might as well have fun with it while it lasts."

* * *

><p>"That's gonna look <em>so cool<em> when it heals, bro," Mikey gushes, hanging over Donnie's shoulder to gawp at the mess of his brother's face. "Like Cable, or John Locke."

"A little room here?" Donnie pleads, the blurred movement at the edge of his peripheral vision jangling his adrenaline-strained nerves. "Unless you want me to stab you with the suture needle on the backswing."

Mikey takes half a step back. Still too close for Donnie's tastes, but after the terrifying moment where they all though Leo had lost his _eye_ he can't blame him for not wanting to stray far.

The slice is long, jagged, and ugly, zigzagging across his brow and down his right cheek. Leo endures the twenty seven stitches needed to close it and Mikey's increasingly rambling monologue about the major plot points of his most recently pirated season of _Lost_ with perfect ninja stoicism.

All of them are very careful not to pay attention to the quiet, tense discussion taking place behind the curtains of Master Splinter's sleeping quarters.

Donnie's not there to see the look on Raph's face when he finally catches sight of the neat lines of pink, Fluorofil sutures (most of their medical supplies are raided from different veterinary schools across the city), but he's familiar enough with his brooding vanishing routine that he's not too concerned when Raph spends most of the next few days out in the sewers.

Then his soldering iron goes missing.

There aren't that many working outlets deep underground, and Donnie knows each of them as well as the scales and scars on the backs of his hands. It takes about an hour's walking to find Raph tucked away in a mostly bricked-up charging station halfway along the N Broadway Local.

"What are you doing?" he asks, even though the hot tin smell of solder and the scattering of scrap wire across the floor makes it more or less obvious.

Raph wordlessly offers up his latest piece: a metal hanger untwisted and folded back onto itself to form a long handle, at the end of which is attached a knot of crudely-soldered wire. Raph's unfamiliarity with metalwork compared with textiles shows clearly—it's a moment before Donnie recognize the piecemeal shape as writing, albeit backwards and very roughly rendered. He takes a second look at the little room, noting the hot plate plugged in alongside the soldering iron, the rejects flung with obvious force into the far corners, the scraps of leather at his brother's feet, burned over and over with barely-legible variations of the same character.

_Anger_. _Anger. Anger_.

Donnie wonders if this is how Master Splinter felt, the first time Mikey proudly flexed his freshly-inked arm.

"You were going to use this to _brand_ yourself?"

Raph lifts his chin, teeth bared. "Didn't figure you'd be the one to gimme this lecture," he sneers.

Donnie turns the brand over in his hands, thumb tracing the sharp edges and sloppy joins. Remembers with a sick twisting in his stomach the echo of sword striking sword, the taunt still curled on Leo's lips as blood splattered across the dojo floor.

"It was a mistake, Raph. Any of us could have done it."

Raph ducks his head, sneer fading. "Yeah, but I'm the one who _did_."

There's a rush of air just outside of the little shelter, a subtle drop in pressure that means a southbound train is just ten seconds out. They're too deep in the shadows to be seen, but Donnie holds his breath as it passes out of habit.

He doesn't know what he's supposed to say, what Raph _needs_ him to say, so he defaults to the one thing he's always been good at.

"The main problem isn't the design itself, but the scale," he says, pointing to the end of the brand. "Something this small and intricate might work on leather, but with the way we scar you wouldn't be able to read it."

Raph's pond-grey eyes—near twins to his own—glimmer white in the fading glow of the train's headlights.

"I was thinkin' right here." He touches a spot high on his right shoulder, nearly level with his collarbone. "Can't really reach it, though."

Raph has never been one to ask directly for something he wants. Donnie licks his lips.

"I'm not going to help you punish yourself, Raph."

"It's not about—" Raph sucks in a long breath, hands curled into fists in his lap. "I fucked up, Donnie. I _really _fucked up. And I don't want to _forget_."

Donnie tightens his grip on the brand, notes how easily the wire bends and warps under his fingers. Slowly, he nods.

"Give me a couple of days to rough out some prototypes," he says. "Then we'll see."

The kanji turns out to be too complex to be done as a single brand, even using steel, so Donnie comes back to Raph a week later with a tray of barbaric looking tools, metal shapes carefully forged to mimic the strong, arching strokes of the calligraphy they paint on their shells.

"This is really going to hurt," he says, turning the first of the brands in the flame of his blowtorch until the metal is a fierce, uniform red. The little alcove reeks of antiseptic and anticipation, but his hands are sure, steady. He can't let himself be nervous. "It's okay if you scream."

"I ain't gonna scream," Raph mutters, eyes shut tight and clenched knuckles white under his wrappings, and true to his word, he doesn't.

If he cries afterwards, a slow, choking seep he doesn't seem to have any control over as Donnie carefully cleans the raw wound and wraps it in cellophane, then for Raph's sake Donnie pretends he doesn't hear it over the roar of passing trains.

* * *

><p>"Show me how to do it," Mikey demands two months after Raph's first forray into branding starts the very serious and very, <em>very<em> long family discussion that ends with their father conceding that if they're old enough to fight each other with live steel, they're old enough to mark their bodies more deliberately.

Leo reluctantly volunteers as guinea pig, bracing himself grimly on the wood pallet table, but Mikey follows each of Donnie's instructions with an attentive deliberation that he almost never shows in practice.

Mikey's first turtle is a little wobbly—the thickness and uneven texture of their skin makes it especially hard to tattoo—but by the time he works his way around to the front of Leo's left arm his lines are as crisp and fluid as his morning katas, fine and delicate in a way his graffiti brashly isn't.

He is, as Sensei always says, a natural.

Donnie can't help but hover, though, one Leo's armband is done and Mikey has sat down with a freshly sterilized needle and a new pot of Donnie's reformulated ink. "You need any help with that?"

Donnie still feels mortified every time he sees the heavily faded ghost of Mikey's sun. His newer inks are much better, specifically tailored for the reptilian leather of their skin, but Mikey had laughingly waved off every offer for a touch up: "That's life, bro. Sometimes shit's not as permanent as you think it is."

In the here and now, Mikey just shakes his head, lips thin and purposeful as he braces his left forearm on his lap. "This is something I wanna do myself."

Donnie nods, understanding, but lingers just in case. Neither of them speak as slowly, carefully, Mikey immortalizes each of their names on his skin in his beautiful, flowing script.

* * *

><p>"There's one thing I still haven't figured out."<p>

Leo lists slightly in his seat, eyes faintly glassy like he's just come up from a long, meditative dream-walk.

He's always a little loopy right after a session, the dump of endorphins making him extra amiable and chatty. Donnie's learned to humor him.

"What's that?" He sets aside the tattoo gun—a newer model, faster and easier to clean—and reaches for the aftercare supplies.

Leo tilts his head towards the ink glistening on his forearm, crisp and black even with the dim lighting. "Why you do this. I mean, _you_ never..." He gestures at Donnie's own bare limbs. "Right?"

Donnie shrugs, rubs absently at his thigh. "I tend to think of my tech pack as a mod. It's as much a part of my body as anything." He's worn it so long that he registers its absence far more keenly than its presence. "Plus I've done all my own orthodontics."

That they even have teeth in the first place is a marvel of mutated genetics, a throwback to their Triassic ancestors, but their jumpstart evolution into something vaguely humanoid came with its own costs. Luckily their shared oligodactylism hasn't proven too maladaptive, but Donnie's narrower jaw had been a painful, overcrowded nightmare until, in calculated desperation, he'd pulled his own left mandibular second premolar to give his remaining teeth some room to spread out.

"Not quite what I was getting at," Leo grimaces. He'd had the unfortunate pleasure of walking into the bathroom right at the crucial, bloody moment. "But fair point."

Donnie grins, flashing the metal loops of his retainer, and unwraps a long length of sterile gauze. "So what were you getting at?"

"I _meant_—" Leo grunts, lips pulling back reflexively at the first touch of cloth against the raw skin of his forearm. "—what's the draw? Is it the tools? The... I don't know how to put it. Like we're a project? Something for you to work on?"

He's rambling more than usual, but this was a much longer session than last time, the swirling pattern on his forearm much larger and denser than the abstract pattern he'd hand-pricked onto Leo's right bicep before both of them decided that—despite the appeals of traditionalism—for their skin, the gun just works better. "Leo, I'm honestly having trouble following you, here."

"_This_," Leo repeats unhelpfully. "I mean, now it's all right, but before? The first time I get, Mikey's talked us all into some weird shit or another. But after, all that time in the Hashi, fucking—" Donnie has to physically brace Leo to keep him from toppling forward off of his cushion. "—fucking _branding_ Raph, when you knew Dad'd..."

It's not the physicality of the Hashi Leo hates. It's the shame of it, the disappointment.

"Maybe I'm a masochist," says Donnie carefully, but Leo frowns, shaking his head.

"Not like that you aren't," he says. "And you're not quite an enabler, either. So what do you get out of it?"

Donnie looks down in contemplation, hand moving automatically to push his glasses back into place.

On his right thigh, just above his knee, is a cluster of three dots, two dark and one light. They're difficult to see against the mottled olives of his pebbled skin, the two darkest little more than filled-in scales, slightly raised where he pushed the needle too deep, the lightest a scar, round and puckered and perfect, a collapsing supernova burned into his flesh.

Donnie has never done anything to his brothers that he hasn't first done to himself.

He thinks about Mikey, eager and still softly round-faced, about the way Leo traces the scar on his cheek with his thumb while he reads, of the burning pride in Raph's eyes as the scabs slowly, slowly peeled away, revealing white flesh underneath. Thinks about what it had felt like. The first puncture. The first burn. The rushing elation, afterward. Joy inseparable from pain.

Donnie rubs at the little constellation, secret and all his own, and smiles.

"I get enough," he says.


End file.
